


Two Stories for Irene

by Judas_is_a_Carrot_Top



Category: Claymore (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Body Horror, One-sided Irene/Teresa, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-11
Updated: 2019-01-11
Packaged: 2019-10-08 03:04:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17378375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Judas_is_a_Carrot_Top/pseuds/Judas_is_a_Carrot_Top
Summary: Irene had always wanted to be a witch.





	1. Witch

**Author's Note:**

> An attempt to expand Irene's background.

One day Irene’s elder sister came in crying. Their father cursed and shouted at her, and for the first time in her life, Irene saw her father weep.  
The next day Irene came along with her father to the midwife’s house for some herbs. It was a long walk, her father grumbling all the while at the length and arduousness of the path. Finally they came upon the midwife’s little cottage by the edge of the woods. The midwife was said to be a witch, but Irene was disappointed when the door was opened by an ordinary, if slovenly, peasant woman.

“Well?”

“We need herbs for-” Irene’s father began, and his tanned face turned red, “-female troubles.”

“But surely it’s not this one, isn’t she too young for it?”

“Of course not my Irene!”

He laid a protective hand on Irene’s head. The woman looked down at her and asked, “Named after the Goddess of Peace, then?”

“No, I just liked the sound of it,” he answered. The midwife stared at him with a very cross look on her face that Irene could not understand, then motioned for them to follow her into the cottage. It was crowded with so many dusty little ointment pots, grubby bottles, and cobwebbed dried herbs that Irene almost could not breathe. She went over to the fireplace, the least cluttered part of the house, where a greasy iron cauldron hung over an unlit fire. There was an oil lamp and a little mirror on the mantel. She stood on her tiptoes to peer into the mirror. They had a looking glass at home, but it was cracked down the middle and wavered slightly so that she could never see her face clearly in it. This one, though, was unflawed.

“That’s my scrying glass,” the midwife said behind her, not bothering to explain what it was used for. “What’d you see?”

Irene answered, “Only my face.”

The woman studied her for a moment, then declared, “You’re a quiet one, aren’t you?” and took Irene’s hands in hers.

Irene’s father, who had got and paid for the needed herbs, grew nervous. “I can’t pay you-“

“No, no, this is free,” said the midwife, frowning at Irene’s palms. Letting go, she said, “She will live long, and in a way do very well, for she’ll always get what she wants. It’s best that you two go as it’s getting dark.”

“What’d you think of that?” Irene’s father muttered as they walked down the path.

Irene turned back for a final glance at the midwife’s house. The woman had lit the lamp over the fireplace. In the quiet gloom, the lamplight was peace itself. Irene’s heart lurched at the sight of it and said, “I want to be like her.”

“What, live all by yourself, with no babies and no husband?”

Even then, Irene had known that she had no use for men and children of her own, and nodded her head vigorously. Exactly like that woman, only with a cleaner house and far less things.

Her father said, “Silly little thing! You’ll change your mind soon enough.”

Then he took a long look at his youngest daughter. He had always found her not pretty but striking with her elongated features and coloring; her skin was only a lighter shade of copper than her hair, against which her bright green eyes stood out. Hers were so unlike the robust peasant features of the rest of their family. If Irene stopped slouching and kept her mouth shut she could easily pass for one of the nobility. Besides she had already cultivated the habit of looking down her sharp little nose at others. She could marry well. Right then and there he swore to himself that he would send her to school even if it killed him and that she’d do better than any of them.

Only Irene would never know of his thoughts then, for three days later the youma attacked their village. Afterwards, as her sobbing father handed her over to a man in black for a chance at survival and for a chance at vengeance- “Live, Irene, live” he had cried as he ran after the cart carrying her away- all she could wonder was how the midwife had fared, for the youma had come out of the woods. She was not surprised to see the cottage half-burnt as their cart rolled by.


	2. Lamplight

“I’m Teresa, and I hate all of you.”

Irene, dulled with pain, sat up in her mean bed and found the newest recruit standing in the middle of the barracks. Teresa was a sullen girl of Irene’s age. She looked incapable of smiling. A central seam of blood down her standard uniform indicated that she had only recently undergone the operation.

The other girls murmured a welcome then turned back to the misery of their recovery. If Teresa had counted on getting a rise out of them with her introduction, she did not show her disappointment and clambered into the empty bunk next to Irene. She turned to Irene and asked, conspiratorially, “What were your colors before you lost them?”

“My colors?”

“Your hair and eyes. And skin too, though mine didn’t change much. Both my hair and eyes were black.”

Irene was taken aback, for she almost couldn’t remember. Did she have red hair like her mother, or was she blonde like her sister and father? And were her eyes brown or green? She vaguely remembered peering into the midwife’s scrying glass, and seeing a flash of green and red. So she answered, without much confidence, “I think I had red hair and green eyes.”

At this the girl’s sullen face broke into a radiant smile. “Oh, that’s lovely! What a waste!”

“But I had tan skin, from working in the fields. My father always made us wash with milk soap to keep us from turning darker.”

Irene realized that it was the most she’d spoken in for however long she had been in this room with the other cut-open girls. She couldn’t even remember if she had been here for days, months- perhaps it had even been a year? Pain distorts time and memory so.

Then Irene asked the girl, in an effort to be kind- “Aren’t you in pain?”

Frowning, so that her lovely features resumed their look of sulky boredom, Teresa said, “Of course. All the time, just like you.”

Years later, grown out of their girlhood but not their pain, Irene was not at all surprised when the summons came for her to dispatch Teresa. It was her responsibility, after all. Teresa had held her to it after they had passed their qualifying exam. Irene had been deeply disappointed with her result, and the last person she had wanted to see was Teresa, who had placed first as was expected. Still, even Teresa had looked the worse for wear with her torn uniform and disheveled hair.

“You’ll get my black card one day,” Teresa had said as she shook the blood off her claymore. “Make sure you don’t abdicate your responsibility when the time comes.”

“Of course I won’t,” Irene had replied coolly, and in that moment she never hated anyone more than Teresa.

“So she’s decided to become fully a monster at last,” Irene said to Orsay, upon being informed of Teresa’s defection.

“Decided?”

“Teresa’s never done anything on impulse. She’s not reckless, though she seems like it at times.”

“And now it’s your responsibility to clean up after her, as always.”

Don’t abdicate your responsibility. Teresa had only repurposed the phrase Irene once used to dissuade her from running away. But Irene’s words did nothing to stay her forward stride, and she disappeared into the woods, where Irene could not and would not follow her.

“It’s less a responsibility than a habit,” she answered.

“Weren’t you two once close friends? I never could understand why girls squabble so over the silliest things. And also-” she could tell that Orsay had smiled from the way his eyes slanted upwards. He practically slavered. “There’s a human child involved.”

Why do their handlers all look suspicious? How come none of them was capable of coming across as benevolent, or even neutral? But then, thought Irene, at least their appearances don’t lie though they themselves often do. And she was struck with sudden longing for Teresa, who was the one who started calling their handlers suspicious-looking men, as they giggled in their bunks with the lamplight burning low. 

“You just know they’d be dirty old men,” Teresa had said. “The kind our mothers told us to stay away from.” And that was exactly what their handlers were.

Irene lowered her gaze to hide her contempt, then wondered what made her do so. It wasn’t humility nor consideration for Orsay’s feelings. It was simply an ingrained habit that she never could break. Teresa would’ve held her gaze level. She never would have flinched. Irene hated herself for thinking, yet again, of what Teresa would’ve done. But then she’d always think of Teresa.

“I’ll end it as simply as possible.”

“As always.” Then, his tone indulgent: “You’re a born lady, Irene.”

She turned away from his taunt and headed to her assignment.

She was almost glad that she would see Teresa again, though she no longer had anything to give Teresa save for a dignified death. But what, then, of the child?

She remembered their conversation on the eve of their qualifying exam. Despite the cadets’ pain, exhaustion, and fear the very air of the barracks was charged with excitement. She was sewing her wound shut for it had gaped from the strain of their training. As she put in one suture after another she said to Teresa:

“After tomorrow we’ll have the chance to fight back at last.”

“If we live.”

“You know you’ll do well. But- what’d you want to do, before all this?”

“Marry and become a mother,” Teresa had replied without any hesitation. The lamplight illuminated the faint smile on her face as she said, “There was a boy-”

Irene had felt her heart lurch as it did when she turned back to look at the midwife’s lamp-lit house, then break as she saw it half-burnt only three days later. She thought once again of the midwife’s scrying glass, for that was the first time she had seen her own face clearly. She could see clearly, too, Teresa with her husband and children, while she would be alone even in her most ideal of lives.

“Why do you look so disappointed?”

So she had said, “I thought you’d want something grander.”

“Living like that is more than grand enough for me, but it’s not like there’s any a chance of that anymore. What did you want?”

Many things, she had wanted to say as she knotted the catgut that held her insides in. So many things that I can’t have anymore, any more than you can marry that boy or have your own children, but if I had to choose only one thing and one person out of many for me to have, it’d be you.

She prepared herself for the severing. There it was- a sharp tug, bringing at last an end to pain.

“I wanted to be a witch,” she had answered. “In a very roundabout way I got exactly what I wanted.”


End file.
